I would rather have a shorter game, than a buggy one. I spent SO MUCH time on side quests (finishing 90% of all non-vegas quests), that when it came to finishing the main, i was so sick and tired of the whole thing, and was wishing it would end, even though i had lotsa fun getting there. I simply can't imagine playing on the console without cheat commands. I used Setgs_fmoverunmult (walk speed) and movetoqt (move to quest location) constantly.

they just want to inhibit some of the demand, remember when the Wii came out? you can't even SEE one in the stores for the first year....they can start at $350 and we'll still see it on ebay for more.$300 for a somewhat revolutionary tech is cheap these days.

my last game on standard difficulty was pretty brutal. i had no money left and was constantly going into the red...either that or starvation.

i realized near the end that every building had to be 'maintained', and i've been building pretty much everything in every city. Is it necessary? am i building too many things that's causing me to go broke?

the game is obviously 100% done...just release the demo already, there's enough hype around the game that any more PR is unnecessary.

to the pirates out there, please just buy this game, it seems the company really did their best to accommodate the PC platform (the game's ONLY platform). We want them to keep making great games. Thanks!

i've got some simulation programs that i run from time to time (not for work, just hobby), BeyondTV (DVR) runs strangely; Sensiva, a mouse gesturing program that i use constantly; 'reget' plugin for Firefox also acts strangely in 7.

yes, most of'em are somewhat obscure and it's probably time to ditch'em at some point, but these programs are so specialized that there are no close substitutes.

i've already bought and tried W7-64bit already, but had to downgrade after finding out how many things it broke with my (heavily-customized) setup.

i know, i know, it's 2010 and everyone should have Win7 by now, but i have many critical programs that don't work with 7...upgrading for a single game is simply not feasible. (unless i do like a dual-boot, arh!)

it's a shame they decided not to support XP, even though there are still S*&T-TONS of XP gamers out there.

In their defense, it's a tiny portion of the population that got the game early. When weighed between the downloaders vs people that gets shafted, it only makes (short term) business sense to let this ride it out. No doubt DRM screws with legit customers, i'm almost certain the game will show up on torrent sites within a week of its actual release.

i thought the map was only average. certainly not at the same level as the original maps. the map lacked any 'personality' and no prominent set pieces that you would remember later. it was basically a lot of empty warehouses in an effort of misdirecting the team, and a LOT of containers scattered everywhere. I can see the map was developed for vs mode, with lots of places to hide, but as a regular co-op map...meh...3/5 (IMHO)

I guess it's time to hear one opinion from a gay person....i don't own an xbox/ps3 at this point, so there's no way to experience the game first hand. But it seems like the game is really well done and fun. I would actually consider buying it if it were on the PC. I have no problem with Card's views unless it reflects on the game directly (does it have homophobic cloth banners or are the bosses spewing gay slurs?). It's just a game. I guess you can always protest by pirating it when/if it comes out on the PC.

But really, if you don't like the author, don't play it. If you like the game mechanics and don't care who wrote what, then play it. It doesn't need a detailed examination of the situation. Much like whether or not one should be a vegetarian.

First of all, authorizing a game through Steam IS a form of 'copy protection'. Second of all, Valve is lucky(? or planned) to publish recent popular games like TF2 and L4D to be intended online-multiplayer only, so pirates needs to first crack a game, then to somehow create a server that allows cracked games to be played on...the whole process is not worth the effort, since most players are not going to play a cracked version on some cracked server. Let's see what the piracy rate is for some non-online game Valve publishes in the future. That being said, there's relatively few pirated copies of HL2 around, maybe they just have very loyal customers?